1. Technical Field
The present invention relates generally to a Light-Emitting Diode (LED) lighting control apparatus and method based on visible light communication. More particularly, the present invention relates to an apparatus and method that collect status information about a lighting means and environmental information about the surroundings of the lighting means, and then control lighting based on visible light communication.
2. Description of the Related Art
A lighting means that uses a Light-Emitting Diode (LED) as a light source can realize visible light communication (hereinafter referred to as “VLC”) by utilizing fast ON/OFF operations of the LED light source.
The VLC technology applied to a lighting means which uses an LED light source is limited in that communication is possible only in an area receiving the light, and a central processing unit can merely recognize status information about the lighting means over a lighting control network Further, such VLC technology is inconvenient in that in order to examine whether the desired illuminance has been output from a corresponding lighting means, illuminance is manually measured using an illuminance meter (a lux meter) under the corresponding lighting means, and in that the CPU newly controls lighting based on the values measured by the lux meter.
The invention according to conventional technology is disclosed in Korean Patent No. 10-0991062 entitled “Light transmission apparatus for visible light communication and method of controlling the power of visible light” The conventional technology relates to a light transmission apparatus for visible light communication and a method of controlling the power of visible light. In this invention, the light transmission apparatus includes a power conversion unit for supplying Direct Current (DC) power to a lighting LED lamp, a driving unit driven in switching drive mode and configured to supply operating current to the lighting LED lamp, an encoding unit connected to an external network and configured to receive and code data and provide coded data to the driving unit, and a control unit for controlling the operations of the power conversion unit, the driving unit, and the encoding unit. This invention provides the method of controlling the power of visible light using visible light communication technology, but it does not disclose a method of transmitting and receiving lighting status information and controlling lighting.